Pied Piper: A Labyrinth Fairy Tale
by Ellen Weaver
Summary: They will say I only take the children who were wished away. As if it were the wishing that brought me, as if I served them. In truth, I only take what is lost. And once, a village lost all of its children, save only one, who was lame...


They will say I only take the children who were wished away. As if I were a wet-nurse, come only when bidden to deal with the fractiousness of children. As if it were the wishing that brought me, as if I served them.

In truth, I only take what is lost.

Once, a village lost all of its children.

The name of this village was Hamelin. And here is the story.

In the heat of the summer, the rats came.

The rats brought famine, but not to all. They first ate the substance of the village, fed themselves to bursting on the corn in the granary, fouled what they did not eat. In times of trouble like this, children starve. Say what you will about the tender mercies of paternal care, too many of them fed themselves, and even their livestock, first. "For if we do not eat," they said, "how will there be anyone to care for the children?"

They did well enough, the proud and prosperous parents of Hamelin, fat and fine, as the poor children starved to death in front of their eyes. Unwritten, although I knew of it, were the less fortunate stories of unguarded infants and even toddlers eaten alive in their cradles by the plague of rats. Stories, too, of the milk-fattened breasts of the mothers, bitten and devoured in the night.

As usual, this famine of food and plague of rats was of no concern until it touched upon those who discovered that their wealth could not protect them.

"What should we do with this plague of vermin?" the burghers asked one another.

I was listening, as I often do. Hamelin was a banquet-table to me. I enjoy the taste of rat, and their sleek corn-fed bodies gave me good sustenance.

"We could hire a rat-catcher," one said.

"To catch all the rats? Surely it would take an army of rat-catchers to be rid of them all, and a cohort of terriers also!"

"A high cost," muttered one red-cheeked man, rubbing his mellow-gold chain of office between his fingers. "How to pay for the rat-catchers? This is the question."

"Raise a tax, of course," muttered another, with a shrewd look to his neighbors.

"I can't afford another tax," sniffed one. "I pay my tithes and taxes. If I spend all the gold in my coffers, what will I have next year except my profits? We are rich because we understand how to save--those poor wretches down-village understand nothing of money and its uses."

"The poor are the ones who suffer the most--let them pay for the removal of the rats."

There was a noise of agreement. And so the word was put out. Twenty gold pieces would be levied by the poorest of the township to pay for a rat-catcher to come to Hamelin.

And by the time the price could be afforded, of course, the last of the children of the poor were dead. Of hunger, of injury, of the illnesses brought about by both.

Such a pity.

It was that day, the day of the burial of the poorest of the children, that I came.

I never name myself, I let others name me. And the name they chose for me, wearing the brown and ivory motley of velveted fur and bones, was the Pied Piper.

The pipe, you ask? Truly a magic pipe, made for me many a day ago by a strange and mysterious... never mind. Suffice to say it was ripe with magic of its own, and that is always wild for to hold. The mortal world is less full of magic these days, and that might be counted generous of whoever orders such things. Yet I digress.

The Pied Piper, named for my parti-colored clothes and my eyes. For mark, the uncanny gaze is one of the signs of my kind, a foot or a hand or an ear or an eye out of place. My left eye is an owl's, my right is a man's, and with both I can see through this world and on into the layers of the next which follow. Pied, they called me, thinking me an uncommon minstrel, with my pipe and my girdle of dead rats, the profession of my trade.

"I am a rat-catcher," I cried to the town square, noting well the hungry and bereaved faces of the poor and the self-satisfied and full faces of the rich. "And I have heard of your village's trouble, and I have the means to rid you of this plague of rats."

"Good sir!" called out a rich man, with the corset-stuffed body of his dame beside him, clutching an even plumper child to her bosom. "We have need of such service as yours!"

"Away with him," muttered a poor woman darkly. "We had need of him weeks ago. Our children are all dead, and now they realize that the rats care not how rich a baby's father is before biting him. Away!" And she made the sign of the evil eye.

And it was true, for even in the shadows of broad daylight, one could see the rats leaping and cavorting, coming forth so bold as to drink from the public fountain in broad daylight, kicked with vigor by the squeamish or fearful. The rats were everywhere, and the women with babies were under some duress. One shrieked as a particularly plump rat braved her skirts to find a delicate morsel to consume.

"You have need of me," I countered. And then I grinned. I could not help it. "If you had not need, your children would be in your houses, in their cradles. You carry them because if left alone, even a moment, they will be devoured. Yes? But if you say you need no help from me..." I spun on my heel, looking through the maze of streets to carry me fastest out of town.

"Stranger..." said one of the rich men. "We can pay you twenty gold pieces to rid our town of the rats."

"Only twenty?" I said, pausing. And I raised the pipe. "A poor man's fee for a poor man's need." And I played a skirl of notes. Music, rat-music, and like the screeching of owls, a strange lure. The rats came leaping, dancing. The people moved aside as a veritable carpet of rats came jumping out of the shadows and the drains to where I stood. And with one jump, I was in the fountain, standing atop the figure of a grotesque there, and still the rats came. The music changed. And I stared at them with my uncanny eye, and they listened with their bodies, and they forgot to swim.

They drowned, one and all. I had played for only a few moments' time, and when the least squeamish of them had begun to pull and count the rats from the fountain, they discovered the bodies of at least eighty-eight.

A goodish haul, but such a waste of meat.

"This is the thousandth part of your vermin trouble," I said, cocking the pipe over my shoulder and lounging atop the fountain gargoyle. "And I say to you that in one day, I can rid this town completely of rats, do you pay my price."

"Name your price, sir!"

"Yes, Piper, your price!"

"My price is this. I ask only what your God demanded of you, that you pay according to your ability, and I will serve according to your needs. From the poorest in your village, you demanded a total of twenty gold pieces. From the richest of your village, then, I ask for twenty gold pieces..."

A moment to let them savor the idea of using the hard-gathered money of the poor to pay their saving fee!

"...each."

I could see then, easily, by their less than shrewd gazes, who among them could afford my price. The indignant looks of the well-fattened, who rode roughshod over the least among them, counting them vermin and of lesser worth, and the looks of the poor, who had lost everything already, with nothing to add to this conversation except the weary anger of the dispossessed.

"It is this, or nothing," I said. "And it's all the same to me."

"We will need to consider this," said the rich man with the golden chain around his shoulders. "We will tell you tomorrow. In the meantime ... Pied Piper, take the freedom of our village. No door will be closed to you, no shelter denied you, no comfort forbidden to you."

"Very well," I said.

I have a waxing hatred of all human habitations. All borders and boundaries and fixed in their frames. But I also have a love for places of transformation and since part of the unspoken bargain with the village was to take their hospitality, I chose the miller's cottage. Neither rich nor poor, a place where grain, transfigured from earth to food, from food to earth, was transformed from seed to sustenance. I had no need to knock, and that was how I knew it was the right place.

"It is the Pied Piper," said the girl standing at the door. Her clean honey-brown braids curved down from her starched white cap over her new breasts.

"Bid him welcome, daughter, and enter."

The girl bowed her head with a frown and moved aside. I saw then that she had a limp, that the tendons of her ankle were marred and twisted.

A place, a very good place.

The miller and his wife were decent people, generous with what they had. They laid a veritable feast before me, of meat and milk and broth and bread, and even the last of their best beer. I made much of picking over the food, eating nothing. Still the girl scowled, noticing how I avoided eating their bread and salt. She filled a small bowl of the family food, and placed it outside the kitchen door.

"For the fairies," she said, reddening slightly, as if embarrassed. But her parents only nodded.

"Tell me, what think you of my offer?"

"We are not rich, and so would not be obligated to pay part of your price, Piper. So our opinion counts little."

"A song, then, for your thoughts?"

The father smiled and nodded at the mother. Outside, the shadows of twilight lengthened into night, and a strange rustling hum settled over the ground.

"The rats," murmured the girl. "They've eaten everything. Those that can't break into the granary nibble at the straw husks in the fields. They eat even the flax and the candles in the church."

"Hush, Ethel."

"They do," she insisted. "My family has raised a fourth of the money the rich men insisted must be payed by the township to hire a rat-catcher, and you come too late to help the ones who needed it the most."

"Ethel!"

"It's true!" she insisted angrily. "They did it because we understand that trouble doesn't skip the rich. They did it because they understand that you cannot bribe the Angel of Death. Don't we grind the grain of the village here, and of the county likewise? We understand that the fields are sown with the sweat of the poor and the gold goes into the hands of the prosperous, and the poor are told to thank God for his bounty in allowing them to live at all. If you asked two hundred pieces of gold from the rich, it wouldn't be a fair price. The children of the poor are all dead. Can you give them back their children with your music? I tell you, it's not fair."

"Honesty," I said, "Is so refreshing. Thank you, Ethel. I will remember what you say."

And I raised the magic pipe to my lips, and began to play.

It was music for dancing. I saw the face of the miller grow young again with light and life, and the face of his wife become soft with the memory of her body's springtime. They joined hands as they must have in their own May-Day, their joy all in each other. But Ethel, one foot in childhood and the other in adulthood, stood in that threshold and seethed with anger red as blood. She dragged her lame foot as she cleared the table, locked the pantry, and banked the fire, her clumsy gait marring the rhythm of my music. And as she did so, I began to surmise the cause of this anger. There was a small cradle put aside by the fire, not long covered with dust. A sibling, then, dead.

I decided to ignore her, then. For a few hours. Facing her anger would have taken an effort I did not want to make; her mother and father had offered me their hospitality, and I was determined to give them the fair cost in dreams and youthful pleasures. I closed my eyes and played until the music was played out. The miller and his wife had worn shiny the smooth stones of the floor. I counted it well done.

"I will sleep in the mill tonight, by your leave," I said, bowing.

"The rats will get you," Ethel said dubiously.

And I laughed. "Rats do not trouble me; I trouble rats. Ethel, unbar the door. I will retire now."

And so it was I spent a wakeful night. All things come to order around me; so it was that by my presence all the knotholes and chinks in the wood and masonry of the mill were sealed, the hinges and axes renewed their oil, the floor swept, the sluices clear of water-weed. This is part of my nature; why fight it?

And also, Ethel came to me.

She pushed her way boldly into the mill, her place that had become my place, with nothing but the moonlight to guide her passage. I lounged there atop the mill-stone, waiting for her.

Even in the night she hadn't undone her braids, and her cap was replaced by a little wool bonnet that clung tight over her scalp.

"Come to offer me your hospitality, Ethel?" I asked, mocking.

"I would strike you if I could." She crossed her arms defiantly over her breast. "You fairy thing. You changeling. After everything else our family has suffered, do we also have to suffer your insults?"

"Tell me how you came to that limp," I said, "And perhaps I will compliment you with a well-turned insult."

I could feel the heat of her blush in the dark.

"The rats," she said. "I had forgotten to bolt the door, and the rats came and bit me."

"And your parents' other child?"

"Dead," she spat. "I was careless."

"Have you been careless again?" I reached forward and let my palm warm itself against the heat of her cheek, but did not touch.

"Perhaps," she said, and I felt her anger burn out, leaving her cold and lonely. "I'm frightened of what you mean to do."

"This I promise. No harm to you. Go to bed, Ethel." And one last barb, because it was also in my nature. And otherwise, I might have broken all bounds of courtesy and pulled the girl directly out of that threshold between maidenhood and adulthood, and that wasn't why I had come. "Don't forget to bar the door this time."

________________________________________

The reply of Hamelin's rich was to be expected. "We will pay your price," they said. "Only first, the rats."

"Is this your answer? That you will pay the price I named, if only I will rid you of the rats first?"

"We say yes, we will pay your price--if you will save us from the rats."

I grinned again, flourishing my pipe. "A third time I beg your answer to this bargain. Do you say you will pay the price I have named, if I remove the rats from your town?"

"Yes!" they called in a chorus, the rich people of Hamelin. And the poor, nothing, for had they not already paid?

"So be it!" I said. "I meet my half of our bargain today!"

And I began to play.

The rats were slow to run to me, this time. Rats are hardly stupid, and, since they might also claim residency of this village, they might have been equally reluctant to allow the townspeople opportunity to display their avariciousness, to fall prey to their own stupidity. But come they did, jumping, and leaping to the music I made. As before, they danced to my tune. And the living carpet of flesh and bone ran down through the streets to the square, and then I led them out of the town, down through the streets, out of the paved roads, into the fields and the downs, down the green banks to the very river, where they were drowned in their multitudes. They swarmed so thick that one might have danced over their piled backs, and dance I did, over stones and bodies, where the mill-wheel churned in its sluice, riding up and over them, until every last rat, from old whiskered graybeard to pink wriggling infant, was dead.

"Now my payment!" I cried from atop the mill-wheel. "Your rats are dead. Render me the payment you promised."

Silence.

"You!" I said, pointing to one. "And you!" to another, part of the chorus of some ten families who had answered yes to the bargain. "Who will be first? For I say now that I will be paid."

"We cannot," said the fat man with the gold chain. "For if we were to pay the amount you demanded, we would have nothing for our children!"

In the door of the miller's cottage, I saw Ethel bite her lip to keep from screaming at this foolishness. But the other rich men of the village, and their women too, all nodded their agreement.

"So you value the lives of your children for gold," I said. "SO be it." And I put the pipe to my lips and began to play once more.

This music was different. Not owl music, but the music of a predator nonetheless. The little children of the rich people of Hamelin, their toes began to twitch, then their feet. Little babes scarce newborn wiggled out of their mothers' arms and clamored towards me. And the same music which danced them to me, danced their parents away. Feet skipping, arms reaching out to clutch children who were dancing towards the river, there to die among the rats.

"Please," shrieked Ethel. "Don't kill them, don't! Take them away, but don't kill them!"

I paused in my playing, a long note luting like a nightingale's, like a question. I hardened my gaze and Ethel, too, all against her will, began to dance. She shepherded the children away from the perilous edge of the riverbank, lured me with a swaying limp to come down from the mill-wheel.

And so I did. I even surprised myself. I can be cruel, but I am also generous, where shown generosity. Ethel, the girl at the cutting edge between womanhood and childhood, was not beholden to the music I was making. She danced for me, though it must have pained her body and her pride.

"To me," I cried, "To me! Go home, people of Hamelin. Go home to where your children used to be, and find there piles of gold that you value so much, money in fair trade for your bargain." And some weeping, but not as many as you might think, all did so.

Still the children and I danced on. Those who could walk carried those who couldn't, but even the babes in arms danced as they were dandled by their taller fellows.

I made my music, and the earth opened up to receive them. The gates of my kingdom opened up to them, and they, to a one, entered in.

And at the last, Ethel.

I twirled the flute over my shoulder with a flourish. "What say you, Ethel, will you come with me?"

She was winded, and bruised, for the path the others had taken with such joy was not easy for her.

"What will become of them?" she asked. "I want to know."

"Ah, but you don't get to know, unless you come with them. Will you?"

"It's not fair," she said.

"No. But that's the way it is. Come with them?"

"I will not," she said, weeping.

I bowed deep before her, honoring her choice. "You've given me a gift," I said. "And for that, a present in return."

And I played one last song before the earth swallowed us up, the gates of my Labyrinth closing over the children and their unknown fate within.

A song of a healthy body, the ripeness of adulthood, the beauty of young love met with its match. The joy of children safe at home, of virtue rewarded and bad deeds punished, of justice. And fairness. A song for Ethel, the only heir of Hamelin.


End file.
